Old English (or “Englisc”) is the English language as recorded from around the year 700 to 1100. Spoken by King Alfred the Great and Lady Godiva, the Venerable Bede and Edward the Confessor, it is the language of such classics as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Seafarer. After 1100 the language went through a period of change so rapid that, by the time two centuries had passed, few could read these old texts. For those interested in learning the oldest variety of English, this translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may provide a pleasurable study aid: just set the modern text and this one side by side and compare the two. But be careful! In this book, Lewis Carroll’s classic tale has been transported into the distant past, before the English had ever heard of tea, imagined a device as sophisticated as a watch, or even seen a rabbit (a later invasive species). Instead, they drank beer, mead, or (when they could get it) wine; an exceptionally learned scholar might have known how to tell time with an astrolabe; and the most familiar long-eared animal was the hare.

“Scouse” is the name of the unique dialect of English spoken in Liverpool. It is a relatively new dialect, dating to the 19th century, showing some influence of speakers from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The Beatles are perhaps the most famous speakers of Scouse, or at least the first speakers who came to public prominence outside the Liverpool region. This book contains a brief sketch of the orthographic principles used in presenting the Liver­pudlian dialect in this edition. The Scouse translation was first prepared by Marvin R. Sumner in 1990, and is now published for the first time in anticipation of the “Alice 150” celebra­tions being held this year.

Cornu-English is that form of English spoken by the majority of native residents in Cornwall. It has also spread overseas to be spoken in areas of the world where Cornish migrants lived and worked-in such diverse locations as Australia, the United States of America, New Zealand, Mexico and South Africa. It may be said to be one of three major linguistic groups operating within Cornwall, a Celtic territory in the west of the island of the Britain. The three are Cornish, English and Cornu-English. Within Cornu-English, it is necessary to point out that although the broad vocabulary and grammar remain the same there are some variations in accent. These can be graded from east to west, and from north to south. In general, the accent in the west of Cornwall (in West Penwith, in particular) has remained quite distinctive, with some observers believing this is because of the later persistence of the Cornish language there. This edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is translated with a nod towards the Cornu-English accent of mid Cornwall; in particular that found in the working-class china-clay mining villages to the north of St Austell. This accent and locate remain interesting because for many years there were perceived as not being as picturesque as others parts of Cornwall, and so received less immigration and loss of Cornu-English speakers.

Gothic (Gutiska razda or Gutrazda) was a continental Germanic language spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in many areas (most notably Spain and Italy) throughout antiquity and the early Middle Ages; while Gothic appears to have become functionally extinct sometime in the eighth century, some form of the language may have continued to be spoken in the Crimea until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Gothic Bible, translated from a lost Greek exemplar sometime ca. 360 CE by the Gothic bishop Wulfila, represents the earliest substantive text in any Germanic language. Gothic itself remains the only significant representation of the East Germanic branch of languages, which have since died off completely. Other extant works in Gothic include an exegesis of the Gospel of John known as Skeireins, a partial calendar, and some minor fragments. Unfortunately, all extant texts are incomplete, so it remains unknown to what extent the extant fragments are written in idiomatic Gothic, as well as exactly what dialect of Gothic they might represent.

This is the first translation into the Border Scots dialect of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Scots was at its peak as a European language of scholars in the 16th century, but its scope and influence has declined since English became Scotland's formal written language in the 17th century. Border Scots has subsequently become primarily an oral dialect, spoken by more than 100,000 people at home, work and play, but not regularly committed to paper for use in a formal context. Recognizing the oral nature of the dialect was an important step in deciding how this first translation of Alice was to be carried out. Border Scots differs from other Scots dialects in terms of its anglicized and unusual flat vowel pronunciations, earning it the moniker of the “yow an mei” dialect. There was an opportunity to echo this sound in the very name of Ahlice, where the drawn out and flattened first syllable acts as an aural clue to the deep timbre this dialect emits in its spoken form. To further achieve this aural effect the common Scots custom of dropping consonants at the end of words and syllables has also been deployed. In particular, applying it to the progressive participle ending -ing to make it -in flattens the sound to a more authentic Borders’ pitch. Elliot Cowan Smith observed nearly a century ago that the Borders dialect will “pass gradually into oblivion” if its spirit is allowed to be lost. It is hoped that the publication of Ahlice’s Adveenturs in Wunderlaant will kindle the spirit and confidence to record the dialect in print more widely, and establish a future role for it in the development of Borders life.

Lewis Carroll is the pen-name o Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the screiver o Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an a lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson stertit his famous bairns’ tale on 4 July 1862, when, on a bonny simmer’s efternuin, he tuik a lang jant in a rowin boat on the Thames Watter in Oxford, alangside his freen the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, Alice Liddell (ten year-auld) the dochter o the Dean o Christ Church, an her twae sisters, Lorina (aged thirteen), an Edith (juist aicht). Frae the poem at the stert o the buik, it’s plain that thae three wee lassies threipt on at puir Mr Dodgson tae tell thaim a tale. Tho sweirt at the stert, he wycely gied in, an by the en o their day oot, he had gethert thegither the makins o an awfy guid splore aboot a steirin wee lass caad Alice. Spreid richt throu the feenishd wark, furst-published in 1865, are a wheen hauf-hidden references tae the five folk on that boat on that happy day.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized represen­tation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. This edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is written entirely in that same alphabet, with fonts specially designed by Michael Everson.

Lewis Carroll wis the pen-name ae Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a professor o mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. His weel-kent story came aboot while he wis oan a rowin trip up the watter ae the Thames in Oxford oan 4 July 1862. Dodgson wis accompanit oan this outin bi the Rev. Robinson Duckworth an three young lassies: Alice Liddell, the ten-year-auld daughter ae the Dean ae Christ Church, an Alice’s two sisters, Lorina and Edith, who wir thirteen an eight. As ye kin tell fae the poem at the stairt, the three lassies begged Dodgson fir a story, an so he went oan tae tell them, wioot a hale loat ae enthusiasm tae begin wi, an early version ae the story that wis tae become Alice’s Adventirs in Wunnerlaun. Acause ae this, there’s a fair few refrences tae the five traivellers in the boat hauf-hidden away throo-oot the text ae the book, which wis published eventually in 1865.

The translator has avoided the temptation to make this translation a "Yiddishized" one, in which the characters live, move, and have their being in a now-vanished traditional Eastern European Jewish world. To do so would be an exercise in nostalgia and would, perhaps, deprive the original of its ageless, fairytale charm. For Alice's world is that of proper, middle class Victorian England, with its manners, morals, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies, and the world she visits is that same world turned on its head, so to speak. In the transliteration from Hebrew to Latin letters, this book makes use of the standardized spelling adopted in 1936 at a conference in Vilna sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Although there are no capital letters in Yiddish print or script, they are naturally required in an Romanization.

To tackle a translation of the first book into the Caithness dialect of Scots was a challenge. Catherine Byrne met it by imagining how her mother, reading the book aloud, would have sounded—“hearing my mother’s voice in my head”, as she put it in an e-mail to this writer. The result is engaging and amusing, and those familiar with the Caithness accent will recognize the achievement at once. James Miller has outlined the history and the main characteristics of the dialect in the essay written for Jon Lindseth’s accompanying volume on translations. Suffice it to say here that Caithness dialect is a form of Scots but has some unique features that reflect the cultural and political geography of the north of Scotland in the Middle Ages when the county was a frontier zone, the area where Norse and Gaelic societies met.This conjunction has left its mark on place-names and on the common speech of the inhabitants.
.

Francis K. Johnson devised Ñspel (pronounced "Ingspell") as a compre­hensive and radical reform of English spelling, because he believes that, in the case of such a magnificently complex and subtle language as English, piecemeal and conservative proposals cause more problems than they solve. Ñspel is largely phonemic, but also has a remarkable conciseness, owing much to the earlier traditions of shorthands. This edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is aimed at highlighting the question of spelling reform and to add an extra charm to the reader's journey, alongside Alice, to Wonderland.

Middle English is the name commonly given to the forms of English current from about 1100 to roughly 1500, between pre-Conquest Old English, which is hardly intelligible today without special study, and the early modern English of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Of course it changed considerably during that period, and different dialects existed in various geographical areas. The form of Middle English used in this translation is for the most part the East Midland and London dialect of writers like Chaucer in the fourteenth century, which is the direct ancestor of our modern standard form of English. It is not hard to read with a little practice, but an extensive glossary has been provided to assist the reader where necessary. Imagining what Londoners of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries might have made of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" provides a historical perspective not only on Chaucer's fourteenth century and Carroll's nineteenth, but on our own time as well.

Ailis's Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies is a translation of Lewis Carroll's classic tale into synthetic Scots. Synthetic Scots is the name given by the poet Hugh Mac­Diarmid to a project that sought to rescue Scots as a serious literary language from the cloying sentimentalism and the music-hall self-mockery into which it had degenerated by the early 20th century. This project was prefigured in the work of writers like Violet Jacob and Marion Angus, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Douglas Brown. Alongside Mac­Diarmid, the project was pursued by Robert Garioch, Alastair Mackie, Alexander Scott and Sydney Goodsir Smith. Ailis's Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies is offered as a contribution to the canon of synthetic Scots texts. Because the original is such a popular and well-loved tale, skillfully crafted in simple, clear and undemanding language, but losing none of its literary excellence for all that, the hope is that Ailis will contribute to making Scots more accessible to both Scottish and non-Scottish readers alike.

The North-East dialect of Scots, locally called the "Doric", has a long and distinguished history as the medium of one of the liveliest and most individual local literatures in Scotland. It first emerged in literary form during the Vernacular Revival of the eighteenth century; an outstanding practitioner of the mid-nineteenth century was Lewis Carroll's friend George MacDonald, who, though his lasting renown is mainly founded on his children's books and fantasy stories, wrote many domestic novels set wholly or partly in his North-Eastern calf-ground, in which the dialect is skilfully presented. In translating Alice, Derrick McClure has endeavoured to find some kind of counterpart for every literary and linguistic trick in the original: that is an ambitious aim, but any translation above the level of a mere crib is a tribute to its source, and an original of such ingenuity as this book deserves the highest tribute possible, in a translation which pays full attention to all the clever and delightful tricks with which Carroll adorned his text. It is the author's hope that the translation will be read not simply as a linguistic curiosity or a test case for some of the problems of literary translation, but as a not unworthy addition to the corpus of Doric literature and Scots children's writing.

This buk is the furst translation o Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland intae Ulster Scots, a language that comes frae the Lowlans in Scotlan an thin wus brocht intae Norlin Airlan in the early 17th Century. Es it’s a dialect o Scots it haes close links wi standart Inglesh, but thur’s monie differences in baith grammer an vocabulary between the twa languages. The orthography used in this book’s based on the spellins that ir maistly used bae native taakers o Ulster Scots.

Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into over a hundred languages, from French to Japanese to Esperanto. In this translation into the rich dialect of the Appalachian Mountains, the translators have treated the story as a folktale, in order to create the sense that the reader is listening as an adult tells the story to a child. The story has been transported from Victorian English to post-Civil-War West Virginia, into an Appalachian setting appropriate for the dialect. The spelling used aims towards a literary ortho­graphy, rather than towards a phonemic respelling of the language entirely, and so it avoids unnecessary “eye-dialect” (funkshun instead of function, and so forth). The sounds of the language used in Alice’s Adventures in an Appalachian Wonderland will certainly be familiar to most readers, but a short glossary has also been included.

This buk is the furst translation o Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland intae Ulster Scots, a language that comes frae the Lowlans in Scotlan an thin wus brocht intae Norlin Airlan in the early 17th Century. Es it’s a dialect o Scots it haes close links wi standart Inglesh, but thur’s monie differences in baith grammer an vocabulary between the twa languages. The orthography used in this book’s based on the spellins that ir maistly used bae native taakers o Ulster Scots.

The Low Saxon translation in this book is based on Carroll’s English original, with rare glances at the handling of names and wordplay in Antonie Zimmermann’s German translation.

To the best of my knowledge this edition presents the first translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Low Saxon (also known as Low German and by its German name Plattdeutsch). This language is a descendant of Old Saxon, one of the ancestors of English. Middle Saxon (also known as Mittelniederdeutsch “Middle Low German” in modern German parlance) served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic Trading League and as such influenced many language varieties along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, especially those of Scandinavia, the Baltic Countries and Northern Poland.

This book is a new edition of the first translation into Swedish, presented for the modern reader. The third translation of Alice into any language, Emily Nonnen’s 1870 version was originally published in a spelling typical of the nineteenth century. In preparing this edition, the spelling has been modernized according to the rules of current Swedish orthography.

This edition presents the first translation into German of 1869 for the modern reader. The translation by Antonie Zimmermann was, in fact, the first translation of Alice into any language. It was originally published in a Fraktur typeface, and was written in a spelling typical of the nineteenth century. In preparing this edition, the spelling has been modernized with care and according to the rules of proven German orthography.